This is a simplified drawing of a bird but the point of this lesson is to get the children to focus on aspects of composition as well as how to draw different objects that might overlap in a picture without getting confused about what to draw first.

This is a skill that is easily overlooked or taken for granted but it is important to get a grasp of this before moving on to more complex compositions.

To emphasize this we drew these three birds in pencil first ignoring all areas where they overlapped... I told them to draw right over the other bird... then using the black sharpie they traced only the lines they wanted to keep or only the parts of the bird that would really show if we were looking at the from the front.